Up From the Bottom, Vol. 1, No. 1
Anti-War Movement
First issue of Up From the Bottom. a G.I. Anti-War newspaper published in San Diego by active duty service members, veterans and their dependents. This issue includes content about a boycott of Tyrrell's Jeweler; the Farm Workers' Strike in San Diego; Nixon's military pay freeze; the case of a female service member held on the Constellation; comics; a reflection by a service member on a nuclear submarine; civil disturbance training in San Mateo; Article 138; George Jackson; counseling services; CIA counter-insurgency; drug abuse; the case of Marvin Jones; the case of Raymond "Charlie" Brown; astride at the Rohr plant in Chula Vista; racism in the labor movement; boycott of Mr. Dependable's; alliance with Vietcong.
Up From the Bottom
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
September 1971
newspaper
Garbage
New Left
"Bringing the revolution to the Ruling Class, the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers export garbage from their Lower East Side ghetto to the halls of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts-all the while, New York was in its longest bitterest sanitation workers strike. " (Roz Payne Archive) <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KtX8IEWabTY" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Newsreel Films
YouTube
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
film
Columbia Revolt
New Left
"In May 1968, the students of Columbia University went on strike after the administrators repeatedly ignored their demand for open discussion of the university's involvement in racist policies, exploitation of the surrounding community of Harlem. This is the story of our first major student revolt, told from inside the liberated buildings." (Roz Payne Archives) <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BUcYLuGiL_s" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Newsreel Films
Kit • Parker Films - YouTube
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
film
1968 New York Student Strike (51 images)
Black Power
Student activism hit a new high point in 1968, when dozens of campus protests broke out at colleges and universities across the country and internationally. Events evolved at a quick pace that year. In the wake of the Tet Offensive in January, an estimated 500 students at New York University demonstrated against Dow Chemical recruiters on campus. Dow was the manufacturer of napalm, a chemical agent used by U.S. military in Vietnam to burn plant life and human beings during the war. Students at NYU and elsewhere opposed the links between the university and what came to be known as the “military-industrial complex.” That same month, Minnesota senator, Eugene McCarthy, entered the Democratic presidential nomination process as an anti-war candidate, shocking Lyndon B. Johnson’s re-election campaign by earning 40% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary.
Shortly thereafter, Robert Kennedy entered the race and Johnson shocked the nation by announcing he was dropping out of the race. In Early-April, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, spurring dozens of urban rebellions in cities nationwide, including Harlem. At NYU, administrators suspended class for two days to hold a series of student-faculty seminars on race relations and formed a new committee to create a policy focused on African American students and other students of color.
From April 22-27, student activists in SDS and the NYU Committee to End the War in Vietnam (CEWV) organize and lead a week-long “International Student-Faculty Strike to Bring Our Troops Home, End the Draft and Racial Oppression,” consisting of a series of campus anti-war protests and discussions, a class boycott on Friday, April 26, and then a march down 5th Avenue the following day. That same day, members of SDS and the Student Afro Society at Columbia University seize several campus buildings in what will ultimately become a significant international incident.
In May, student activists in Paris trigger a nationwide strike there. In June, Robert Kennedy is gunned down in Los Angeles after winning the Democratic primary in California. In August, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the “Prague Spring” protest movement. A few days later, Chicago police attacked New Left protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
In mid-September, a new controversy erupted at NYU surrounding the appointment of John Hatchett to head up the Martin Luther King Afro-American Student Center on campus. Hatchett had been a civil rights activist during the early-1960s, most significantly participating in sit-ins, marches and other demonstrations in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1963, he moved to New York City to attend graduate school at NYU and Columbia University. He also taught in the New York public school system, where he continued to advocate for the interests of local black communities. On October 11, three months after Hatchett assumed his position as head of the AASC, administrators fired him amid claims that an article he wrote, “The Phenomenon of the Anti-Black Jews and the Black Anglo-Saxon: A Study in Educational Perfidy,” was anti-semitic and anti-white. In a speech, he had also referred to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Richard M. Nixon and the president of the United Teachers Federation, Albert Shanker, as “racist bastards.” NYU President, James Hester, told reporters that the primary cause of Hatchett’s firing was that he had “proved to be increasingly ineffective in performing his duties because of the incompatibility of many of his actions and public statements with the requirements of his position in the university.” The firing was applauded by many local Jewish, Catholic and Protestant religious leaders, but sharply criticized by campus militants. The American Jewish Congress stated at the time that they hoped the university would replace Hatchett with “someone who is more likely to guide black students into harmonious relationships with their fellow students and the communities in which they will live.”
In response to the firing, NYU student activists mounted a series of demonstrations, including a general strike that lasted for about ten days before fizzling. Student radicals also occupied two buildings on the NYU Bronx campus. The university ultimately offered a compromise, allowing Hatchett to remain an adviser to African American student groups on campus. In November, the AASC became independent of the university, run by a board made up of African American students and faculty.
The images in this set were taken by Roz Payne during the NYU protests of
Hatchett’s firing. Interestingly, a number of the signs also reference the local Ocean Hill-Brownsville “community control” movement that was powerful at the time in New York public schools. Activists saw both as examples of the need for greater autonomy for black and brown people within local educational institutions.
The Ocean Hill-Brownsville district had been reorganized as an experiment in local control of public schools, with a community-controlled school board instituted in the primarily African American neighborhoods. Rhody McCoy was appointed superintendent of the new board. McCoy, who was popular in the black community, was a controversial figure because he was a follower and friend of Malcom X. Some claimed he was heavily influenced by Harold Cruse’s seminal book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and believed Jews were too involved and powerful within the black freedom movement. McCoy also appointed Herman Ferguson as the principle of one of the schools in the district. According to an article he wrote in The Guardian, Ferguson advocated that schools offer "instructions in gun weaponry, gun handling, and gun safety" as important survival skills for children of color in a racist society. Ultimately, the appointment was withdrawn.
Over several months, tensions simmered between the new Ocean Hill-Brownsville board and a number of white teachers and staff who the board claimed were trying to sabotage the experiment in local control. In response the school board attempted to fire 83 teachers and staff, almost all of whom were Jewish. The teacher’s union balked at the move, which violated terms of their labor agreement with the district. Albert Shanker, the head of the teacher’s union called the board action, "a kind of vigilante activity." In response, teachers went out on strike. When they attempted to return to the school on May 15, a group of parents and community members who supported the board attempted to block them. Local police broke the blockade, allowing the teachers to return, though the board closed the schools. On May 22-23, teachers again protested by staying home, promoting the board to fire 350 more teachers.
At the start of the new school year in August and September, a city-wide teachers' strikes shut down the New York City public schools for 36 days. The strike caused divisions among civil rights leaders and union members. Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph supported the striking teachers, causing sharp criticism from many black parents, teachers and a new generation of racial justice activists. While large percentages of teachers participated in the strike, black and brown teachers, as well as white teachers who taught primarily black and brown students, tended to support the strike in much lower numbers.
The strike ended in mid-November with the state seizing control of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district and reinstating the fired teachers. Some argued that militant black teachers were “purged.” Undoubtedly, the conflict heightened tensions between the African American and Jewish communities.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
New Left Notes, vol. 2, no. 1, January 6, 1967
New Left
New Left Notes was the official newspaper published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This issue includes articles about the Student Strike Conference at the University of Chicago; the role of students in social change; high schools and freedom of press.
Students for a Democratic Society
Bruce Pech
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
January 6, 1967
underground press
A.J. Muste at 5th Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade (1 image)
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
Roz Payne photograph of legendary pacifist and anti-war activist, A.J. Muste, during a 5th Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade in New York City, perhaps in 1965 or 1966.
During the mid-1960s, the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade organized dozens of local peace and anti-war groups in a series of anti-war parades, “peace-ins” and other events. Dave Dellinger, who would later gain notoriety as a member of the Chicago 7 during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, and Norma Becker, who worked for the War Resisters League, led the group.
A.J. Muste was born in the Netherlands in 1885 and emigrated to the United States in 1901, where his father was a factory worker at a plant in Michigan. Muste was ordained as a Dutch Reform minister in his young adulthood and moved to New York City with his wife and three children. There, he was introduced to liberal theology and pragmatism and joined the local chapter of the National Civil Liberties Union, which would later become the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization formed in opposition to WWI by Muste, Jane Addams and Bishop Paul Jones. Muste’s stance against the war compelled his more conservative congregation to oust him.
Following his rejection by the church, Muste focused his peace and justice work on the political left. During the late-1910s and 1920s, Muste worked within the labor movement, famously leading striking textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and serving as the director of the Brookwood Labor College, a training school for the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations. In 1929, the more conservative American Federation of Labor accused Muste of being a communist, prompting him to found the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, a faction dedicated to organizing for militant industrial unionism. The CPLA ultimately evolved into the Trotskeyite, American Workers Party, which Muste led until a religious experience in 1936 prompted him to break with Marxist-Leninism and rededicate himself to Christian pacifism.
As national secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Muste dedicated himself to training a new generation in nonviolent direct action against racial segregation. He also published an important book, Nonviolence in an Aggressive World, in 1940. As the southern black freedom movement gained steam, Muste became an important adviser and ally to prominent advocates of non-violence, like Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr.
During the post-WWII era, Muste was also focused on opposition to the Cold War and U.S. militarism. He continued to write and counseled draft and tax resistance to oppose those policies. In 1941 he said, “The problem after a war is the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?” Later, he argued, "We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life. Disarmament cannot be achieved nor can the problem of war be resolved without being accompanied by profound changes in the economic order and the structure of society.” Muste helped form several organizations dedicated to militant nonviolence and the creation of a New Left.
As a new generation of young activists rose in opposition to the war in Vietnam, Muste gained a new following and influence. In an article in a 1965 issue of Liberation, titled, “Who Has the Spiritual Atom Bomb, he wrote, “It is said that if the United States were to stop shooting and withdraw its troops from Vietnam, the Viet Cong would then stage a great purge of the people who we have been seeking to protect — have pledged to protect. First of all, so far they have been getting precious little protection from us. The Vietnamese people as human individuals have been shot at by the French, by us, by Communists, by guerrillas for years. Maybe, if only somebody would stop shooting at them that would be something to the good.” In a 1967 New York Times article, “Debasing Dissent,” Muste was famously quoted, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” In defense of dissent, Muste wrote in 1967, shortly before his death, “There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force.” Muste played a central role in organizing the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Muste died in 1967.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1965 or 1966
Strike!
Labor Movement
These pages were produced by Rubber Band, a student research collective in Berkeley, California, and focus on labor tensions at the four largest rubber manufacturers in the U.S. Art by Lisa Lyons.
Rubber Band
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
unknown
underground press
Support Farm Workers
United Farm Workers
The United Farm Workers of America was founded in 1962 following the merger between Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and Cesar Chavez’s National Farm Workers Association. The new union was led by Chavez and Delores Huerta. In general, the UFWA sought to raise awareness of migrant workers’ rights and utilized nonviolent strategies such as collective bargaining, strikes, and boycotts, to secure and protect farm-workers labor rights, work hours, wages and access to health care. During the late-1960s and mid-1970s, the UFWA initiated well-known boycotts against table grapes and lettuce to protest what they viewed as unfair labor contracts and unacceptable working conditions.
United Farm Workers of America
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. mid-1960s
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Physical Object
Strike! April 26
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
On April 26, 1968, the Student Mobilization Committee organized an international student strike, including teach-ins and sit-ins addressing the Vietnam War, anti-imperialism, racism, and the draft. Some have estimated that as many as a million high school and college students participated in the protest.
The Student Mobilization Committee, originally named The Vietnam Day Committee, was formed in 1966 “to coordinate opposition to U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam among college and high school students.” The group, which was active until it disbanded in 1970, organized protests on campuses and in cities. It is also credited with being one of the first anti-war organizations of the 1960s-era to include civilians and soldiers alike.
Student Mobilization Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
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Physical Object